THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eleven

When I think about it the Taiwanese ones are taller and the Korean ones are heavier.

When I think of a Taiwanese rom com that works, like It Started with a Kiss, I think of its dizzy heights – girl gets giddy when she gets to be in the same building as boy. When I think of a Korean rom com that works, like My Girl, I think of its weight. I feel it and I weep it. Might it have to do with how serious the Koreans are about everything?

Yes, be it in Taiwan or Korea, rom coms are almost always about how the good girl gets the guy. But in Korea they don’t just tell you she is good and absolutely adorable. They also put her through the wringer of extreme Confucian ethics and test her goodness time and again – or they do in My Girl.

(SPOILERS AHEAD.)

This is a roller coaster of a show constructed on the conceit that the heroine is a liar with a heart pure as snow. The rom com of errors starts slow, with how she is hired by the hero to pose as his long-lost cousin at his grandpa’s deathbed; then it goes up, down and round steep narrative slopes when grandfather lives and won’t let granddaughter leave and she has to keep lying – and suffering.

Oh, there is comedy here. Oh, there certainly is (as well as lived-in loverly banter). I really remember laughing.

But the weeping is more memorable. Late in the rom com the heroine has to sound cheerful saying goodbye to the hero. He thinks this is goodbye for now; she is just going to Jeju Island, isn’t she, and he is joining her ASAP. But she knows she is going somewhere else and never coming back; this is goodbye forever. After their goodbyes she is about to fill in a departure form at Incheon airport when the dam bursts. The last lie she told him weighs so heavily, she can’t stay on her feet any more. All she can do is sink to the ground and bawl. Very, very bitterly.

This bitterness I somehow took with me when I went jogging last Saturday. I went up, down and round a hill, bawling. So few things get under my skin these days, however, it felt good feeling bad that day.